In my experience, yes and no. Homelabs seem work because they let you experiment while striving towards goals (normally hosting something). That means that the

In my experience, yes and no. Homelabs seem work because they let you experiment while striving towards goals (normally hosting something). That means that the organic problems that arise are the best teachers, since you're honestly motivated to overcome them. Getting your homelab to boot up and run containers is an honest problem to solve. Figuring out the kernel modules to let you pass through your GPU or run ZFS on root are actual blockers to hosting a gitlab instance. Running gitlab on multiple nodes to get high-availability is an honest problem to solve. Trying to do it in multiple VMs just to see how it works might teach you something, but it can feel pointless unless it's serving a real goal. I think that choosing a more complicated setup is good because it is hard, and forces you to learn more to achieve the same goal (and ultimately, some of those skills will hopefully be useful). Additionally, there used to be some limitations on consumer CPUs around nested virtualization, which made it difficult to run VMs in VMs. When I was hosting apps in VMs on a machine, I would want to play around with the machine's configs, but risked disrupting my hosted apps. If I broke something, I didn't have my hosted apps until I got around to fixing my machine. Having multiple machines ensured that I could tinker with one while relying on the other. The process, by accident, gave me an intuition for planning upgrades to infrastructure. This intuition bubbles back into the design process. I don't often own infrastructure for multiple upgrade cycles professionally, so it is a good way to earn some wisdom on my own.